The Thriving Maker

#19: Time Management Magic: Navigating the Holiday Season Without Overwhelm

• Sarah Kavanagh • Episode 19

Share episode

The holiday season can sometimes  feel like a whirlwind for makers and small business owners. In this essential episode of the Thriving Maker podcast, I share my expert strategies for managing time, balancing business and personal commitments, and avoiding burnout during the festive period. 
Learn how to strategically plan your schedule, use time-blocking techniques, set non-negotiable priorities, and most importantly—master the art of saying "no" to preserve your energy and joy. 
I'm offering up practical advice to help you sail through the holidays with calmness and satisfaction, ensuring you enter 2025 feeling renewed and excited, not exhausted. Whether you're a craft business owner, artisan, or creative entrepreneur, this episode offers actionable insights to help you thrive during the busiest time of the year.

Thanks for listening, please follow the podcast if you enjoyed this episode and share with a friend.

🚨 QUIZ: Your Creative Business Growth Type

Shop the Year To Thrive Planner:
➡ Year To Thrive Planner 2025

Connect with Sarah:
➡ ONLINE | https://designermakercoach.com
➡ INSTAGRAM | https://www.instagram.com/designermakercoach



Sarah:

Hello, welcome to the Thriving Maker podcast. In today's episode, I am talking all about managing your time, and especially during the holiday season, where we feel like we're getting pulled from pillar to post. So, wherever you're listening and however you're listening, I hope you enjoy. Welcome to the Thriving Maker podcast. My name is Sarah Kavanagh, your host, and I started the Thriving Maker to support makers, crafters and artists just like you to grow your creative passions into flourishing businesses on your terms and give you the life that you want. I'm a jewellery designer maker and started my own handmade fine jewellery business over 15 years ago. I now also help other artisans and makers build their own craft and handmade businesses through marketing and branding and techniques and strategies I've studied, learned and put into practice along my journey. Right now, I want to help you to establish and grow your own designer business so it can help support the lifestyle that you want. Think of this as your go-to resource and check in for all things strategy and marketing for your business, along with stories and anecdotes from my life as a handmade entrepreneur. Thank you for tuning in and welcome to the Thriving Maker podcast. Hello, today I want to talk all about managing your time as a maker, a small business owner, in particular in this busy time of the year, in this festive season that we're currently in and if you're listening to this at another time, there's a wealth of information that you will be able to take away from this episode as well. So during this time of year Christmas season, the holiday season we can feel like we're getting pulled from pillar to post. So you have your business work and you also have a very busy personal life as well. So you will be busy with your business, with your craft business, with your handmade business, but you will more than likely also be busy in your personal life as well, and these two things can become overwhelming if you're not really strict with managing your time, and that's really what I want to touch on today. So my first recommendation is to take half an hour or an hour, look at your diary and plan out all the things that are non-negotiables between now and the end of the holiday season. So what do you absolutely have to be at? Where do you, where do you need to be, what you need to do on particular days, and really mark those in your planner, in your diary and they're non-negotiable. So if you have a dentist appointment or your children's Christmas play, whatever it might be. That is a non-negotiable. You can't shift, and this generally is will be in your personal life. Mark those in your calendar. Now.

Sarah:

That's step one, and then the next step is to have a moment to think about how you want your days to work. Do you want to be finishing work at three o'clock? At four o'clock Will you be working? Are you working just in the evening on your business? This is so work out how much time you then have available to carry out all your business activities. So I allow about four hours a day for my business work, and this enables me to be a bit more flexible with family activities such as after school clubs, picking children up from various bits and bobs, but also sometimes I will be able to spend longer working on my business. So work out how many hours that you have in the week and when those hours fall. So it could be every day or it could just be three days a week that you are able to work on your business, and in that time you then need to write down or to make a note of the things that you need to do in the week.

Sarah:

So, is it production? Are you still making products or have you got all your stock made already? And you're really focusing on sales and delivery at this time of year. So try and map out what activities for your business, in particular this time of year, rather than maybe in the new year, when your business activities might be very different. So in this particular time of year, this festive, holiday season, where you can be very busy map out how much time you are able to spend on your business and what activities need to take priority. So this might include production of your pieces, it might include sales and marketing work. It should definitely include marketing work and it might also include delivery time and factor in if you are taking products to a post office, factor in how long you are going to be there for, because at this time of year there are an awful lot of other people posting items. So bear in mind that you may be stood in a queue for half an hour at a post office waiting to send your products out. So these little things that we don't think about, but they can actually take up an awful lot of time and if you're not accounting for them and planning for them, it can throw you off a little bit and your diary and your time can feel really stretched. And what we really want, and what I really want you to feel like at the end of the festive season, is that you have achieved what you wanted to do. You've made the sales that you wanted to do, but you also feel calm and joyful about your business and your family life and you are not feeling pulled in every direction.

Sarah:

So once you have your week planned out, be really strict with your diary and your scheduling. Really make sure, if you have said you're going to stop work by three o'clock to go and pick up children, make sure that you have definitely cleared the decks by that time. Try not to carry work over to the next day. It can be inevitable that things will get passed on and on and on, but where you can try and be really strict with your time, another technique that is really useful is time blocking, and you can use a timing cube or an alarm on your phone or a music playlist that you play for one hour at a time. There's lots of different tools and apps that you can use to keep your focus for a certain length of time so that you're not going over that time on the same piece of work, you're moving on to your next task or your next activity, and that really helps to manage your time and keep you on track with what you've planned for that particular day. The other reason I want you to really try and be strict with your time, especially with your business time, is that this time of year is when we really want to be spending time with those that we love, and there can be all sorts of events going on that you want to enjoy without feeling like you need to be somewhere else. So it's essential to manage your time carefully so that you are, you can go to these other activities and you're not feeling that you're that you haven't finished your work on your business that you wanted to do.

Sarah:

Now there's another element to time management that I think often gets overlooked and can be really hard to do, and that is to say no to things. It's so easy to and, especially if you're a people pleaser type of person, it's so easy to just say yes to everything. Yes, I'll pick this up. Yes, I'll redesign this particular piece for you. Yes, I'll, and it will be ready by the end of the week. Yes, you can say yes to so many different things that put extra pressure on you. So, if it's not essential and if it's going to throw you into a panic, start saying no to things. Start saying no to offering to take your children and their friends ice skating because somebody else has dropped out.

Sarah:

Whatever it might be I'm saying that as an example because I can see that happening in my own life. So, whatever it might be, just think. Take a moment before you jump in and agree to everything. Take a moment to decide whether it's something that's going to benefit you, your business and your family, and if it's going to and your family, and if it's going to add stress and chaos. If it's the latter, take a moment and then politely decline, and the aim here is really to not overwhelm your time and not to fill up every second of your diary, of your calendar, with so many things that you hit January exhausted. I want you to hit January not feeling exhausted and run down and not wanting to do anything, but hit January with a sense of excitement and renewed energy, because you've been able to enjoy this holiday season for what it is, and make sure you add into your diary time to buy gifts for those you love and, if you can support other small businesses and buy from fellow makers. What I would love for you to do is take a moment this week, carve out an hour of time and really sit down and plan out the upcoming weeks until the end of the festive season, so you really know where you are and what you need to do and you're not going to be overwhelmed or overstretched as you go through the upcoming weeks as you go through the upcoming weeks.

Sarah:

So one thing I have put together that I really think will help you as you move forward into 2025. And really help with your planning and your strategies for next year Is a downloadable 2025 planner. You can get the link in the show notes. It's a very small price, so it should be affordable to everybody, but it's something that you can download and print up yourself or use on. If you use goodnotes, you can download it, load it onto. You can save it onto there and fill it in as well, so I hope you'll take a look. It's essentially a planner that you can use to plan out each quarter so that you know what you're focusing on and you can work towards the goals that you set yourself each quarter and making sure that you are setting goals that fill your whole life, and it's not just about working on your business. It's also about setting goals for your wellness and goals for your mental wellness as well. So I hope it will really help you. It's something that I produced many, many years ago, but I'm bringing it back because I do think having some structure to the year really helps and, however you use it, I hope it will be of benefit to you. So go and check that out if you're interested in that. So that's it for today.

Sarah:

As I said, take a moment this week, if you can, over the weekend or before. Definitely do it before next week. Take action, and I'm all about taking small actions, so I'm going to insist that you do this this week or when you've listened to, whenever you're listening to this. So take a moment and map out your schedule and your time management for the upcoming weeks, so it will take you through to the new year, and I want you to reach 2025 with a sense of calmness and satisfaction for what has been, and not be there with overwhelm and feel exhausted. So if you do this exercise, it will really benefit you going forward. I hope that's been of help. As I said, you can access the printable planner via the link in the show notes and and it's also available from the designer maker coach website. So do go and check that out and I will speak to you soon. Take care, bye for now.